Losing weight: eating less, exercising more or both. What is wisdom?

You want to lose weight. That is why you are going to exercise more. Because you want to lose weight, you will eat less in addition to exercising. But is this combination actually wise? Do you get the best results this way?

Convert fat into muscles. Nonsense!

When you exercise, you consume calories. This is your energy. This is also the intention, because the more calories you consume, the greater the chance that you will use your body’s fat. The result: you lose weight. Every now and then you hear that your fat mass converts into muscles. That is nonsense! You consume the fat and at the same time you build muscle mass. So you don’t convert it. By the way, you increase muscle mass for both strength training and cardio.

Not lost weight, but slimmer

Muscles are relatively heavy compared to your body fat. That is why you don’t see any real change in your weight at the start of exercise. You will notice that your clothes will fall more spaciously. You only see the effect of building your muscles (muscle mass) after a certain time, because muscles are active tissue. In other words, whether you use them actively or not, they use energy. In other words, the more muscle mass, the higher your so-called resting metabolism. This is also the reason to mainly work out if you want to lose weight. Not only because of the energy consumption during exercise, it is also easier to stay on weight in the longer term.

You smell like acetone

It sounds logical: eat less if you want to lose weight. That is not necessarily true. If you want to lose weight and therefore you exercise it is important that you do not eat too little. With too little food (read: energy intake) you not only consume fat mass, you also address your muscle mass. And that is just not the intention. An additional disadvantage with not eating enough is also that your resting metabolism is lower. Do you recognize this? You smell at someone in the gym or during another sport a scent that looks like acetone. A clear sign that someone is breaking down his muscle mass. Exercising then makes little sense except when it comes to weight retention.

Set achievable goals

The combination of eating less and burning more is fine in itself. You don’t have to do a lot of exercise or eat very little to achieve visible results. Some numbers to give you an impression.

You want to lose 1 kg:

You then need to consume 7,000 kcal more or eat seven thousand kcal less than you need.

An average person needs around 2,000 kcal per day,

It is therefore almost impossible to eat less, to lose a kilo a week.

In order to lose weight, you will therefore also have to use energy, so you start exercising. Even then losing a kilo is quite a challenge. A more feasible and therefore realistic goal is to lose 0.5 kilo p / w. Translated into figures, around 500 kcal get less per day (eat) and / or consume more (exercise). To give you an idea: using 500 kcal is roughly equivalent to an hour of intensive training. Translated into food, it corresponds to 2 hearty sandwiches and 2 glasses of soda.

For the best results, I advise you to consult a professional who will help you to coordinate your eating habits and your activities.